November 1, 2013 — As designers, we usually turn to different sources of inspiration, and we’ve discovered the best one: desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than usual. We’re very thankful to all the designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for November 2013. Read more…

October 31, 2013 — As Web designers, developing websites that work well on mobile devices is an important aspect of the work we do. And selling a responsive design is no different than selling anything else. It all starts with solving problems. For this project, we highlighted the benefits of a responsive approach beyond the familiar benefit of support for mobile devices that we normally mention to prospective clients. Here are some of the key points we made in discussing the value of a responsive approach for a website without an obvious need for mobile support. Read more…

October 29, 2013 — Today, Mike Cunsolo will show us how to use Grunt in a project to speed up and change the way you develop websites, looking briefly at what Grunt can do, before jumping into how to set up and use its various plugins. Then he will explain how to build a simple input validator, using Sass as a preprocessor, how to use grunt-cssc and CssMin to combine and minify our CSS, how to build our compressed assets on the fly, and much more! Read more…

October 28, 2013 — In this article, we will discuss several recent such experiments, with special focus on new forms of storytelling, as well as new business models for publishers — a fascinating recent trend called “subcompact publishing” will be our main reference. Read more…

October 25, 2013 — In this article, Zeno Rocha presents a series of workflows in Alfred that will boost your productivity! A collection of great tricks to automate your work. Hopefully, some will speed up your workflow. Maybe they will even inspire you to share some of your hidden secrets of productivity. Read more…

October 24, 2013 — Much of that page weight could be reduced if images were conditionally optimized based on device width, pixel density and modern image formats. These reductions would result in faster loading times, but the debate isn’t about whether to optimize images for different devices, but about how to go about doing so. In this article, Shawn Jansepar will take a look at Mobify.js, which lets us generate small images for small devices from a single high-resolution image. Read more…

October 23, 2013 — Some websites outperform others, whether in their content, usability, design, features, and so on. Details of interaction design and animation make a fundamental difference on modern websites. We’ll share some lessons drawn from various models and analyze why these simple patterns work so well. Read more…

October 21, 2013 — When it comes to CSS, Thierry Koblentz is convinced that the only way to improve how to author style sheets is by moving away from the sacred principle of “separation of concerns”. CSS authors thrive on styling documents entirely through style sheets, an approach that has been sanctified by the CSS Zen Garden project (what most developers consider to be the standard for how to author style sheets). Read more…

October 18, 2013 — Jeremy Girard has had the opportunity to lead various Web design and development teams, including a number of professionals fresh out of school. Along the way, he learned some valuable lessons. So, he decided to make a list of some of those lessons, as a way to remind himself of what he needed to do to make sure his designers had the resources needed to succeed. Many of these lessons were actually common sense, and these common-sense lessons are exactly the ones that are easy to neglect and that we often need to be reminded of. Read more…

October 17, 2013 — Developing an application in HTML5 is a way to leverage code across multiple platforms, rather than having to write the application from scratch for each platform. As such, much of the user interface would be done in HTML. It’s important to understand the benefits each potential development strategy affords. As an app developer you have the ultimate decision on what strategy best suits the needs of your application. Test early, and test often, across a variety of devices. Keep your technology choices open and flexible to reap the rewards of a hybrid experience. Read more…